Communism

Full text of Elena Kochetkova’s The Green Power of Socialism: Wood, Forest, and the Making of Soviet Industrially Embedded Ecology, a book on the relationship between nature and humans under state socialism.

In this episode from the New Books Network podcast, former RCC Fellow Ryan Tucker Jones is interviewed on his recent book, Red Leviathan: The Secret History of Soviet Whaling.

In this Springs article, environmental historian Donald Worster delves into the material events behind cultural imaginaries in China, while asking for an ecological civilization. “Can humans learn, by subordinating their appetites to their brains, how to live on this earth intelligently and ethically?”

Xenia Cherkaev and Elena Tipikina examine the institutions of the Stalinist state that planned the distribution, raising, and breeding of family dogs for military service. The investigate how the program affected human-dog relations.

Beginning in 1948, the Soviet Union launched a series of wildly ambitious projects to implement Joseph Stalin’s vision of a total “transformation of nature.” By the time of Stalin’s death, however, these attempts at “transformation” had proven a spectacular failure. This richly detailed volume, In the Name of the Great Work follows the history of such projects in three communist states—Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia—and explores their varied, but largely disastrous, consequences.

This animated film tells the story of a family which lived in the village next to the Chernobyl reactor, and whose lives were destroyed during the 1986 disaster.